Posted on

It’s where you’re going and who follows that matters, not ‘tone’

It’s where you’re going and who follows that matters, not ‘tone’

What is the test of presidential leadership?

To the Washington establishment – not to mention the Republicans running for president — leadership is a matter of “tone,” and Barack Obama has failed. Obama’s words since the Paris terrorist attacks were not surprised enough, angry enough or determined enough to win the approval of American opinion-setters.

Never mind that the Paris attacks, however shocking and contemptible, can’t really be described as surprising. Given the frequency of terrorist attacks over the last 15 years, the ongoing war in Syria, the flood of migrants, the cultural stresses within French society, and the fact that a similar attack happened in Paris earlier this year, the attacks were as predictable as, well, the next shooting spree on an American college campus.

“This changes everything,” people in Paris have been saying, presumably setting the right “tone.” But it doesn’t really change much. Terrorists have attacked before, and they will attack again. The forces driving Islamist violence are unchanged, and the options for stopping it are the same as before.

Obama knows enough not to say it in those words, but he understands the situation. He understands the importance of tone as well, and when he’s trying to focus the attention of his countrymen on an issue, he’s quite good at it. But he also understands that generating applause among American voters and approval from media critics is not a priority. Changing minds and actions of people in foreign capitals and the war-torn Middle East are.

So he refuses to say “Islamic terrorism,” despite pointless complaints from Republicans that Obama hasn’t done enough to associate mass murderers with one of the world’s great religions.

George W. Bush was great at tone: We’ll defeat “the axis of evil,” he told Congress. “Either you’re with us or you’re against us,” he told the world.

But his father, George H.W. Bush, who understood that a president’s words are heard with different ears in other parts of the world, was critical of the aggressive tone of his son’s statements, privately at the time and publicly in a just-released biography.

The tone George W. Bush used to lead America into the Iraq quagmire didn’t convince the leaders of Saudi Arabia and other front-line states – nations that had joined his father’s Gulf War coalition – to support the son’s invasion. And no amount of inspirational rhetoric could make up for W’s failure to generate a plan for post-invasion Iraq.

That’s because the real test of presidential leadership is whether anyone follows, and whether leader and followers get to the right place.

Leadership isn’t just another word for unilateral military intervention, though a lot of Republicans seem to think so. And Obama would likely be the first to admit that he hasn’t been able to lead people like Russia’s Putin, Syria’s Assad, Israel’s Netanyahu, Turkey’s Erdogan and Iran’s Khamenei to trade their goals for his.

But the Middle East isn’t the center of the universe, and terror attacks by a Syrian death cult aren’t the only threat facing the U.S. and the world, as heretical as that sounds.

Elsewhere, Obama has a pretty good record of international leadership. After the crash of 2008, he helped mobilize other economically advanced countries to apply the stimulus that started a slow recovery, at least until austerity factions turned off the spigot. In Iran, nuclear centrifuges are now being dismantled because of Obama’s leadership in the face of political opposition at home. However you feel about the Trans Pacific Partnership, negotiating a landmark agreement setting new rules for trade is the kind of diplomatic achievement historians recognize as evidence of effective leadership.

This week Obama is in Paris for the most important test yet of his international leadership. Climate change poses the kind of existential threat fear-mongers wrongly assign to Islamic terrorism. In advance of the Paris conference, 157 countries have made commitments to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, matched by specific steps they are taking to reach their goals. The U.S. pledges to reduce its emissions by 25 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have been working toward this leadership test for a long time. Agreements they negotiated with China, Japan and other countries help bring them to the table. Actions Obama took since his first days in office – green energy subsidies he included in the stimulus bill, mileage standards negotiated with U.S. automakers, EPA rules on power plant emissions – make America’s commitment credible.

If Obama succeeds in Paris, the world will have finally come together to launch an ambitious, but practical, response to a looming global threat – and “tone” will have had little to do with it. That’s a test of presidential leadership.

Rick Holmes can be reached at rholmes@wickedlocal.com.

Rick Holmes

Commentary

Social Share

LATEST NEWS